The ext3 filesystem does orders of magnitude more I/O than ext4 in
mkfs - a brief benchmark showed 14m to make a 1TB ext3 filesystem
vs 7 seconds to make a 1TB ext4 filesystem, with the ext3 filesystem
doing upwards of 6GB I/O.
Since ext4 has been a default in all major Linux distributions for
a long time now - RHEL...

Based on initial comments and feeback here - https://bugs.launchpad.net/nova/+bug/1228977/comments/13
We need to move to and support newer libvirt versions for Nova. There have been changes in the recent past and the current trunk at least supports running unit tests with libvirt 1.1.1.
Based on initial investig...